


The Bride

by phoenike



Category: The Elric Saga - Michael Moorcock
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-09
Updated: 2013-03-09
Packaged: 2017-12-04 19:07:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/714021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenike/pseuds/phoenike
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elric dreams of Stormbringer. Or is it just a dream..?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bride

**Author's Note:**

> Another really old one, from 1997. I was 22 when I wrote this and barely knew that fanfic existed. The writing is kind of clumsy but I don't find it horrible, so here goes.
> 
> This is probably rife with errors -- I haven't read Stormbringer in ages. It's very likely Elric never went to the Castle of Nihrain at a point where this could have happened.

_Where is the bride, Elric?.._

Elric opened his eyes, the strange, whispering voice still echoing in his ears. The room was quiet. He was alone. On a heavy table, hewn from a solid block of black marble, a single candle burned in its holder. In the wide bed beside Elric lay his great black runesword -- he had placed it there before falling asleep, as if afraid that even in the very heart of the ancient castle of Nihrain some horrid spawn of Chaos might leap from its realm and slay him in his sleep, thwarting him from his fate -- the fate that was the only thing that could give him any kind of consolation, any longer.

Slay him in his sleep... Not as if it was much of a sleep. In those last days of the Beginning of Things, the purpose with which he had been filled was far too urgent and intense to allow him any peaceful repose. When he slept, terrifying vistas unfolded themselves before his mind's eye. Nightmares made up of glimpses from a future where Law would rule and men reap Chaos around them of their own free will. Backward echoes from a world to come where Law would turn into Chaos, and that Chaos breed its own kind of Law. From a world where nothing he now understood and relied on would hold true. How could he sleep peacefully, haunted as he was by such visions?

Yet it seemed he  _must_  be sleeping. For there it was again, the insidious, dark whisper from nowhere and everywhere. "Where is the bride, Elric?"

"Who are you?" Elric asked in a low voice that still held some drowsiness. "Is this some trick of Chaos? Is it you, Arioch? Whoever you are, show yourself!.." And even as he spoke, he knew it was not Arioch, nor any of his hellish minions. Elric had banished the Dukes of Chaos from the Earth. Therefore, he had to be sleeping... for there had been the unmistakable quality of Chaos to the whisper.

"In some realms, Elric, you know," the voice continued almost playfully -- only now did Elric realise there was a feminine timbre to it -- "there is an old custom, a custom which says that before the wedding, bride and bridegroom will sleep in the same bed, a sword between them, never touching each other, to prove their chastity and patience. The sword is there, Elric... Where is the bride?.."

This time, the words finally caught Elric's full attention. And with them came a stroke of slicing pain -- pain and guilt -- two faces -- gentle, beloved faces full of horror as the hell-blade devoured souls, worlds, destinies. "Is this my own conscience, come to torment me in the quiet hours of night?" he wondered. "Is this some new way in which it seeks to turn my remaining days into agony? How much more guilt can one man bear, even a Melnibonéan -- and, perhaps, especially a Melnibonéan -- before going mad?"

Had he, then? Had he gone mad? Oh, he would welcome insanity. Some thought he was mad already. They never spoke it aloud, but there it was, in their eyes, far too strong a thought to be missed by him.

Soft laughter. And, as the Melnibonéan turned his head to look toward the source of the voice, he saw a woman lying beside him, across from the heavy battle-blade. She was leaning her head against one hand, looking at him with strange, dark eyes -- not unlike those of his late wife, though infinitely more mysterious. Her perfect, full-figured body was stark naked and, seemingly, in no way a cause for any shame or modesty whatsoever. Her beauty was unlike anything Elric had ever witnessed. Not more perfect... just different. She was not human, but neither was she Melnibonéan. She was like the core of age-old stone carved into flawless symmetry; her skin had the blue shimmer of cold stars, and her black hair flowed and curled in all the foaming abundance of black spell-songs flowing over oily waters.

"Better?" Her voice was an infinity of sunless realms stretching beneath the fabric of Elric's own reality. "To your liking, yes? I know you so very well, my companion. I know the games you play with your mind when sleep will not come."

 _Who? What?_  Elric wanted to ask, but dared not. The meaning of her words was already dawning to him. How odd! How unexpected... What a strange imagination he had. Even after all the years of polishing his mind to perfection -- one of the essentials of sorcerous craft -- its recesses and backmost quirks still sometimes succeeded in surprising him.

"You have your bride, Elric," she said, not without twisted humour. "You have your sword, and the bride that goes with it. I am the bride, and the sword. I will never leave you. Even in death, I will be with you. Even in death, Elric." And she reached her hand and, as if her touch was some strong acid or unknown poison to metal, the runesword flowed into her like black, lustreless quicksilver, rendering her skin an even more otherwordly, dark gloss. Elric coudn't but stare in weary, helpless wonder, adoring her evil beauty in spite of himself. She was far too familiar to be resisted.

"What a strange dream," he murmured as she moved across the bed to where Elric lay on the covers in full clothing, her luscious body moving with the poise and inevitability of great waves. Her face was an inch from his, her heavy-lidded, fathomless eyes gazing into his own crimson orbs as if... yes, as if to drain away his soul.

"It gives you such comfort to think this is just a deam, doesn't it?.." she smiled, before embracing him, at last. Her lips were cold and breathless and soft like the taste of forbidden drugs; they brought to him a memory, a shadow of something forgotten, an oblivion he would have welcomed with desperate joy. But her touch made him alive, very much alive. Her touch would have awakened the dead, and he was not dead -- not yet, though something in him had begun to die already. She had been right. She was all his feverish dreams put together, all the women he had had (and would have had) formed into one entity -- soulless, perhaps, but not without a personality, and a deep undercurrent of sorcerous potential that, perhaps, lured him even more than her beauty. What made him want her so badly? Maybe it was desperation, born out of a knowledge of end's imminence. Maybe it was nothing more than the knowledge that did he not take what this dream was giving him, he might reject what was, perhaps, his last chance at a moment's relief from his path.

And now she moves beneath him, opens her legs to him, and suddenly he knows there is something unforgivably familiar to her feel, something horridly well-known to the way she moves, to her warmth, to her scent, to her taste, to the softness under his acute Melnibonéan hands. Even the touch of her teeth against his tongue is familiar. And he draws breath, sharply, and raises his head, to cry out in lamenting horror. For beneath Elric his dead, Ilmioran wife -- the sweet, fierce flower of the Weeping Waste -- smiles and throws her head back as if in pleasure. And she looks at him as he flinches away, dark eyes shining with inhuman feeling in the face of the human woman Elric once loved, and still does.

"What, now?" sighs she, and reaches out a hand. "What frightens you so, my love? You have embraced me a thousand times before in your sleep."

True. But none of those dreams had been like this -- none so real, so... consuming. "You are not Zarozinia," Elric growls, eyes blazing with denial. "And if this is only a dream, I shall will you away."

"Oh," she laughs, and her laughter is like the tingling of tiny silver bells. "And I thought you liked this small human husk. But perhaps there is a deeper longing?.."

And now she becomes Cymoril, fragile, sorrow-eyed Cymoril, lean and young; brittle spirits of air glitter in her long hair that is fairer than the dawn of Imrryrian spring. In Elric's mind images of past beckon to him, his beautiful cousin laughing in a rain of white flowers, smiling at him from years past; there shall be no home, no white flowers, now -- only Chaos that allows no such constancies, and ages of darkness before primordial life shall rise to look at another kind of dawn, another kind of spring. "Is not this what you dreamt of with your wife in your arms, Elric? Is not this what you remembered in the long evenings in Karlaak, and dared not look at your human wife, lest your despair show in your eyes? Is not this what you almost sold your soul to have back?.."

And now he knows this is no dream. Even the depth of Elric's guilt -- his cruel, Melnibonéan imagination as its weapon -- could not expose him to such exquisite torture. He turns away and sobs. And, after a while, dark hands reach to hold him, to soothe him, and he accepts their cold, malicious embrace eagerly, seeking at the dark mouth with his own, grasping at her pliant, false flesh as if it was dried dragon venom, as if -- horrible though the pain might be -- it could also yield such unconcern and strength as was to be found from no natural exercise.

He makes love to her, cruelly, with no trace of tenderness, spends his seed within her even while she laughs at his wolf-like snarls. "I have you," she whispers. "I have you now as I've always had you, from the moment you first held me... Sweet morsel! One day I shall take you as you take me now."

And Elric lies alone in the dark, fully clothed, and wonders whether it was, after all, a feverish dream... The candle flickers, unlit things glitter in half-darkness. Gradually, his breath softens, he lies so still as to be dead already.

Play of madness? Or something more? He doesn't want to care. He is no longer sleepy and longs for the luxuriant forgetfullness of battle -- an end for the mad games, played by beings older and -- Melnibonéan though he is -- far more cruelly sophisticated than he.

Elric looks at the sword. It lies still, too, waiting like a lover on the dark silks.

 _I hate you_ , he is about to say, but dares not. At the moment, he knows, the depth and passion of his hate would make it sound like a confession of love. And so he just stares at the black hell-blade, at the runes that seem to twist and shift and change their meaning every passing moment; and from the entity called Stormbringer a soft purring comes like distant laughter, an echo of the thousand revenges that may yet be taken in other times, in other lives.


End file.
